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Donna Brazile, the long-time Democratic operative who took over as the chair of the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential campaign, has published a tell-all book. It’s the kind of political book that is described as “explosive,” because Brazile dishes the dirt on the likes of Hillary Clinton, the Clinton campaign, President Obama, and other topics that titillate the inside-the-Beltway crowd. You can read the Washington Post article about the book and some of its revelations here.

For example, Brazile now says that she was so concerned about Hillary Clinton’s health after Clinton’s fainting spell at the 9/11 ceremony that she actually considered exercising her ability as party chair to try to throw Clinton aside as the Democratic nominee and replace her with the ticket of Joe Biden and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. Brazile says the Clinton campaign had no energy, disrespected her and the DNC, and didn’t allow the DNC to participate in get-out-the-vote efforts; she also recounts an incident in which she told Clinton campaign operatives that they were treating her like a “slave.” She says that the fix was in on the primary battle between Clinton and Bernie Sanders due to a joint fundraising agreement between Clinton and the DNC that effectively gave the Clinton campaign control over finance, strategy, and staff decisions, providing it with an advantage over other candidates.

I read about Brazile’s disclosures in the Washington Post article linked above, and I wonder: why do these political operatives always seem to wait until after everything is settled before speaking up? Who knows whether, for example, providing information during the primaries so that the news media could report on the joint fundraising agreement might have made a difference in the result? And when Brazile took over the DNC, why not immediately publicly expose the culture of corruption and financial mismanagement that she describes in her book? But the D.C. operatives never seem to do that, do they? Instead, they smile and give speeches and toe the party line during the campaigns, regurgitating the canned talking points on the Sunday morning public affairs shows and hoping for a good result so that they can be appointed to some plum position by the new President — but then when the results are bad, they write a tell-all book and make a hefty personal profit spilling the beans.

It’s not exactly principled behavior, is it? Of course, this is the same Donna Brazile who, when she was a paid contributor to CNN, gave the Clinton campaign a heads-up on potential topics and questions that might be asked at a CNN town hall, so maybe she really didn’t care all that much about the Clinton campaign getting an unfair advantage. And in any case, since when should we expect principled action from the gaggle of toadies and sycophants that seem to make up the vast majority of the political class in both the Democratic and Republican parties in this country?

As Forrest Gump might have said, any day with the Trump Administration is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re going to get. Yesterday, we got the decision from President Trump to fire the Director of the FBI, James Comey. And, to accentuate the bizarre, bolt from the blue aspect of the decision, Comey apparently learned of the decision when the news flashed across the TV screen behind him while he was giving a speech, and he initially chuckled and thought it was a joke.

The Deputy Attorney General, Rod J. Rosenstein, prepared a memorandum citing reasons for Comey’s discharge that stated: “I cannot defend the director’s handling of the conclusion of the investigation of Secretary Clinton’s emails, and I do not understand his refusal to accept the nearly universal judgment that he was mistaken. Almost everyone agrees that the director made serious mistakes; it is one of the few issues that unites people of diverse perspectives.” Among other mistakes, Rosenstein cited Comey’s curious July 5 press conference, where Comey announced that charges would not be pursued against Clinton but then castigated her creation of the servers and her handling of confidential materials. Rosenstein stated that Comey acted “without the authorization of duly appointed Justice Department leaders” and added: “Compounding the error, the director ignored another longstanding principle: we do not hold press conferences to release derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal investigation . . . we never release it gratuitously . . . It is a textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.”

But there is something very unsettling about the Trump Administration’s abrupt decision to discharge Comey for actions he took months ago, because the decision comes in the midst of an ongoing investigation into Russian influence into the last presidential election and the actions of the Trump campaign in relation to the potential Russian involvement. Trump’s letter to Comey giving him the boot oddly acknowledged the ongoing investigation, stating: “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.’’ And Rosenstein has only been at his Department of Justice post for two weeks, which suggests that his first job assignment in his new position was to consider whether Comey should be fired.

Not surprisingly, Democrats are up in arms about the decision, which they compare to Richard Nixon’s infamous “Saturday night massacre” of Justice Department officials, and members of Congress are calling for an investigation. I think an investigation makes sense, but until then I’m going to reserve judgment and see what develops. There’s no doubt that Comey had his issues, and it may well be that — unfortunate timing aside — the White House and the Department of Justice had legitimate concerns that he simply was incapable of handling the kind of highly sensitive investigations the FBI must undertake in a non-partisan way. On the other hand, the timing is unfortunate, and naturally gives rise to suspicions about what really happened here. A through investigation will help to establish the facts and clear the air.

It’s been six months since the last presidential election, which means it’s time for those tell-all books about the campaign to start coming out. The first one that I’ve read about is called Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign.

I enjoyed the Theodore White Making of the President books way back when, and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 remains one of my all-time favorite books, but I’ve long since stopped reading the “insider” accounts that now come out after every election. I haven’t read one in decades because the lack of loyalty inherent in the form of the book makes me sick to my stomach. Professional staffers provide juicy tidbits as part of an overall information campaign to cover their own butts, make themselves look good, and position themselves to get hired and do it all over again in the next campaign cycle. The losing candidate always gets torn down, while the wise, far-sighted staff that the candidate was supposedly stubbornly ignoring get elevated.

So, Hillary Clinton was frustrated that she wasn’t doing better, and from time to time lashed out at her staff when voting results or polling weren’t favorable? Gee . . . is anybody really surprised that a person who is seeking the presidency — and who saw her election as an historic opportunity to shatter a very visible “glass ceiling” for American women — from time to time had that reaction? When you’re on the griddle for months, 24/7, as presidential candidates are, of course there are going to be times when fatigue and frustration leave you not at your finest, and when the results aren’t going as you hoped, the effects of that fatigue and frustration will inevitably be compounded.

So Hillary Clinton lost her temper, and she and Bill Clinton administered an occasional tongue-lashing. So what? She lost. Can’t we just let it be, without having rat-like staffers heaping scorn on the losing candidate with anecdotes carefully pitched to make themselves look good? If I were a potential presidential candidate, I would never hire somebody whom I suspected was the source of leaks in one of these tell-alls. Loyalty is an important quality when you are working for a politician, and people who leak stories to promote themselves are finks who simply can’t be trusted.

2016 has been a crappy year for a lot of reasons, but the 2016 presidential election is one of the biggest ones. The election dominated the news all year, from the seemingly endless and embarrassing Republican primary debates to the improbable Bernie Sanders movement to the unfathomable, and for the most part totally unpredicted, victory of Donald Trump. Every night, we got hit over the heads with Trump’s latest outrageous tweet, or Clinton’s big-money speeches to Goldman Sachs, or Trump’s appalling comments about women, or Hillary’s ill-considered private email server. It was a year of all election, all the time.

There are those who are happy with the results of the election, and there are those who are bitterly disappointed, and angry, and disgusted. And then there are people like me: I’m just glad that this wretched election is finally, officially over.

Westworld is right up there with The Leftovers as the most confusing show since Twin Peaks. It’s so intentionally mystifying that I don’t even try to understand it, or piece together the disparate threads of the plot. I just wince at the horribly bloody violence that is likely to occur at any tender moment, groan at the show’s troubling core assumption that any human who goes to a fantasy world will promptly turn into a blood-soaked, sex-crazed lunatic, and recognize that any character in the next instant could be revealed as a robot, a cold-blooded killer, a psychopath, or all three. (I also cringe for the actors who have to routinely sit buck naked on chairs on a sterile set while other characters question them and tap iPads, but that’s another story.)

I’ve stopped trying to figure it all out. Kish and I watch the show, and I just let it kind of wash over me, rather than struggling to make sense of why Dolores’ outfit changes from instant to instant or why Bernard’s interactions with his fake dead son are so significant. I realized that the show had reached the point of ridiculousness this past week, when I was walking back from lunch with two friends, one of whom watches Westworld and one of whom doesn’t. The watcher and I started talking about the show, and after a few minutes of discussion of “Billy” and the possibility that the show’s plot is running along different timelines and the importance of the photo of Billy’s bethrothed and whether the twitching beings at the church Dolores visited were troubled robots looking for some kind of salvation, the non-watcher asked, with a baffled laugh: “What is this show?” And I realized that it was all pretty silly.

So I’ll watch the finale, but I’m not expecting that I’ll get everything in this episode, because that sure hasn’t been the case in the past episodes. I just make one request: before we move on to “the new narrative,” can you at least let us know what the old narrative was all about?

I always listen to music walking to and from work. This evening, as I was listening to my acoustic playlist, it struck me that American Tune by Paul Simon — a beautiful song that is one of my favorites — pretty accurately captures how many people are feeling these days. I’m not just talking about disappointed Hillary Clinton voters, either. There seems to be a strong sense of disquiet, an unsettled feeling, mingled with curiosity, trepidation, raw hope, and uncertainty about what might happen next, lurking throughout the general populace. Some of those feelings stem from the election results and the thought of Donald Trump as President, to be sure, but some of them also seem to flow from concerns about the direction of the country as a whole. Where is our road leading?

American Tune, which was released in 1973, aptly crystallizes this odd mixture of emotions and sensations. Simon wrote:

I don’t know a soul who’s not been batteredI don’t have a friend who feels at easeI don’t know a dream that’s not been shatteredOr driven to its kneesOh, but it’s all right, it’s all rightFor lived so well so longStill, when I think of the roadWe’re traveling onI wonder what went wrongI can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong

Two verses later, the song concludes, in a mixture of pride, doubt, fatigue, and resignation:

Oh, we come on the ship they call the MayflowerWe come on the ship that sailed the moonWe come in the age’s most uncertain hourAnd sing an American tuneOh, it’s all right, it’s all rightIt’s all right, it’s all rightYou can’t be forever blessedStill, tomorrow’s going to be another working dayAnd I’m trying to get some restThat’s all I’m trying to get some rest

It says something about the universality of music when a song written at the end of the Nixon Administration can so perfectly express how so many Americans are feeling, 45 years later.

And, because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, people are asking questions — which get raised after every close presidential election — about whether we should abolish the Electoral College and just elect our President through a simple national referendum.

I’ve got no problem with any of these developments. In America, people have the right to protest thanks to the First Amendment, and we’ve also got the right to take a fresh look at our constitutional institutions and decide whether to change or reject them through the constitutional amendment process. I’m not in favor of the states along the west coast, where we have lots of friends and family, actually seceding from the United States, of course, but I also have no problem with people seriously discussing the disconnect between the perspective on the coast, where voters gave huge majorities to Hillary Clinton, and the results found in the interior, where Donald Trump racked up huge vote totals.

I think all of these developments are signs of a healthy, functioning democracy, and they also convey an extremely important message: elections have consequences, and voting is the way to produce the consequences you favor. In 2016, tens of millions of Americans didn’t vote at all. Hillary Clinton got about 6 million fewer votes than Barack Obama did in 2012, and early indications are that certain groups — like “Millennials” — didn’t turn out to vote in the same way they did in 2008 and 2012. We’ll never know what the election results would have been if all of those eligible voters had exercised the most basic democratic right of all, but it sure isn’t a bad thing if the people who didn’t vote now feel remorse and resolve that it will never happen again.

Wouldn’t you like to know whether all of the people out protesting Trump’s election actually voted on Election Day?